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Halo Fanon:About
Welcome to Halo Fanon Wikia (Halo Fan Fiction Wiki), a wiki dedicated to fiction pertaining to the Halo franchise. This wiki was co-founded by bureaucrats and on January 11, 2007, although since its inception, both original bureaucrats have resigned. History 2007—2008 Formation Halo Fanon, then-named Halo Fan Fiction, was slowly building up steam as word of mouth spread across . At first, the main contributors were from users on Halopedia moving their fan fiction onto the site, basically called "Dumping" as they liked to call it. Soon, the Fanon rules were written and the "dumping" had ceased, with users needing to either edit them to a common standard, moved them to their namespace, or simply leave them on Halopedia. Problems arose with the first vandal that vandalized Halopedia, who then moved over here to Halo Fan Fiction. Recognising they needed more help, RelentlessRecusant and H*bad added and to the Administration listing. Soon afterwards, more people were brought onto the Administration team: for technical help, , and finally . First Year During the first year of Halo Fan Fiction, the idea sprung up that a name change was in order. So, H*bad contacted a member of the Wikia staff to change up the title from Halo Fan Fiction to Halo Fanon. This would later spark some debate with the name, but it was decided that Halo Fanon would be kept as the title of the website. During this time, multiple problems arose between the Administration and the Community. The Community felt that they weren't allowed to have their voice heard. Some Administrators believed that the community needed to be heard on all issues, while others felt that the community shouldn't need a say so because the Administration was a representation of the community. This "Great Schism" between the Administrators and Community lasted on until about the middle of July, when Administrator H*bad stepped down. During this time after the Schism, everything calmed down to a regular rate and life on the wiki continued. Post-Schism The post-Schism times resulted in a shake-up of the Administration team. A vote was held in order to figure out if there was a need for a RFdA (Request for De-Administration). Votes were held to RFdA Administrators Leon2323 and Donut THX 1138. It was concluded at the end of the vote that they will be De-Administrated after the RFA process, a process new to Halo Fanon. The RFA applicants included , , , , and as possible future Administrators. Sgt.johnson decided during the RFA that he should step down from the campaign process and allow the others to be voted on. After the RFA was finished, the new administrators were named to be Lordofmonsterisland, Spartan-077, and Subtank. Reconstruction Everything post-RFA remained relatively peaceful on the Halo Fanon Wikia Wiki. New users were joining, growing the wiki. Unfortunately for a time only Spartan-091 remained the sole active Bureaucrat, with RelentlessRecusant and Rotaretilbo taking a period of absense. After an election took place, Subtank became the newest bureaucrat. First Annual Wikia Awards On December 1, 2008, RelentlessRecusant introduced the Annual Halo Fanon Wikia Awards, adopted from the Star Wars Fanon Wiki. Being the first of its kind, a few minor issues had to be sorted out, and a small disagreement occurred between users (see "The MaT Problem" below), but the first Annual Awards were an overall success and Halo Fanon continues to hold this ceremony at the end of every year. 2009—2010 The MaT Problem A user named joined the wiki during the Reconstruction period, with more or less a clean record, although the majority of his articles were humour-based. After witnessing what he called "atrocities on the wiki", he would start up his "crusade," taking up the self-appointed role of "Noob Messiah". According to him, many new users were being bullied by "more experienced" users. Meat and Taters had a following and caused what some would later call "The Second Halo Fanon Civil War". What started off as a good-intentioned, if largely flawed, quest to end users acting not in good faith, ended up with Meat and Taters and some of his followers going off the deep end and causing even more problems. The Administrators were again held under scrutiny, with the effects felt for a few months before eventually subsiding. Good Articles In June 2010, proposed the creation of Halo Fanon's Good Article project, in order to bring recognition to the wiki's best works. At the time, it had effectively replaced Fanon of the Month as a more ideal system for distributing awards. The Good Article project was an immediate success, and numerous articles received the award for the latter half of 2010. The project took a downturn in nominations in the following years but picked itself back up again in 2013. The Good Article panel is currently moderated by , who took over from , who in turn had taken the position after Grizzlei retired from the project. Possible Move When Wikia released the new skin for the site wide, many Wikias decided that it was time to pack up and leave as they felt that that the Central Wikia hub was being unfair to the rest of the Wikia Community. Halopedia followed suit soon after and then Halo Fanon put it all to a vote. Although at the beginning it looked like it was all but assured that Halo Fanon would be moving, time finally taught the community of Halo Fanon that moving wasn't the right choice. Although, there were many suggestions on where to move and how to move, it was decided that it wouldn't be right for Halo Fanon to move simply due to a skin issue that, according to many, wasn't an actual issue at all. After this the vote was closed and Halo Fanon remained a part of Wikia for the foreseeable future. 2011—2012 Halo Fanon continued to function normally with relatively little to disturb its development. Activity had taken a notable downturn in the 2011/2012 years, which had earned this time period the nickname of "the quiet years", or in more historical terms "the Great Depression". At this time, the wiki's rules, policies, and overall systems have been well and firmly grounded after three years of hard work. Halo Fanon's future is likely to be a promising one, regardless of how much or how little activity there may be. 2013—2014 In the year 2013, activity on Halo Fanon has picked itself back up fairly well. A number of new ideas introduced to the wiki also encouraged its rapidly continuing expansion. New Roleplays In late 2012, Ajax 013 had introduced the idea of directing a roleplay where the characters and factions would have statistics and objectives as its driving force. He set the stage in early 2013 for RP:Hammer Fall, Halo Fanon's first stat-based RP. This would later inspire Sonasaurus to rework the structure of Halo Fanon's Survival of the Fittest project so that it would also be more stat-based as well as probability-based. Restructuring Fanon of the Month As of April 8, 2013, the Fanon of the Month project was restructured to promote the works of new users specifically. The purpose of this was to encourage newer users to put more effort into their writing as well as strive to improve on the wiki and stick around for years as opposed to mere months. With this change, older users' works would be featured solely through the Good Article project. This change also helped avoid conflicting rivalries between the two projects, which had resulted in a downturn in nominations for Good Articles for long periods of time. Administrative Change Due to a major lack of site activity from several administrators, Sonasaurus initiated the first Administrative Evaluation in November of 2013. Over the course of a week, Halo Fanon's community voted to keep or remove its current administrators based on activity and overall usefulness on the site. This was done to ensure that our administrative team was comprised of reliable, consistent contributors. Three administrators were removed and one put on probation after the evaluations, and elections were then held after to appoint three new replacements. Community Activity After some lengthy periods of little notable activity on Halo Fanon, 2014 saw a surge in community-based activities that breathed new life into the site. In addition to the ongoing online community gaming sessions known as Halo Party Time that brought quite a few of the site's prominent users together, a number of new roleplays and community stories were initiated during this period. In addition, Halo Fanon saw a surge of new users arriving and remaining on the wiki, thanks in part to them joining the IRC. This soon lead to an increase in cooperation between writers. 2015—2016 Canon Policy Update In early 2015, the decision was made by Halo Fanon's Administration and spearheaded by newly-elected Bureaucrat Brodie-001 to finally update the site's canon policy after nearly five years, with the intention of elevating 343 Industries' work to primary canon status. This was done with the intent of bringing the Halo Fanon Wiki up to date with the mainline Halo canon, which had been ignored for several years by a number of users. After February 1st, 2015, all new universes on the wiki had to abide by 343i's post-war canon. In the interest of fairness to users with universes predating Halo 4, universes made prior to that date were exempt from the changes so long as the writer only wrote within that particular universe. This would allow for a gradual transition for our site's work to incorporate the new canon without having to NCF hundreds of pages and years of hard work. 2017—Present Ten Year Anniversary On January 11th, 2017, Halo Fanon officially celebrated its tenth birthday! Not long after, a blog post and collage of famous site characters were created to celebrate this event to both congratulate the community and wish it the best of luck in years to come. Discord Chat On June 6th, 2017, the Administration made the decision to integrate a Discord chat widget into the wiki's sidebar in order to encourage more discussion among site users. With a growing divide between those on the IRC and those who preferred to use Skype in recent years, this was seen as a good mix between the two and proved to be incredibly popular. It has since become the site's primary method of user communication and a hub for all sorts of discussion. Culmination of the Clean-Up Project Started in 2013, the Clean-Up Project was the brainchild of admins Sonasaurus and Lordofmonsterisland. Intended to remove many of the unused, small articles of long inactive users - moving them to namespace - as well as get rid of the articles of banned users, the project began by users looking through and listing all articles on the site by inactive users. Over the next few years, the project continued, slowly removing articles and raising the overall par quality of the site until culminating with the final namespacings on September 19th, 2017. At this point, LOMI began planning new directions for site clean-up, such as removal of red links and unused images. April Fools '07 H*bad made the wiki into a full April Fools day. The Main page had the new messages which lead to the April Fools page. The Logo and background were also changed. As were other various parts of the wiki. '08 No site-wide April Fool's was carried out this year: however, due to the anticipation surrounding the Necros project, Ajax 013 and Sgt.johnson did pull an April Fool's joke of a sort where he placed joking pictures and comments on the Necros article itself, all of which stated that the Necros were brain-eating cats that had laser eyes and horrible spelling. '09 , in a last minute decision, attempted a rather low-key April Fool's prank: both the Sitenotice and the New Talk Page Message were changed to say that Jason Jones and Joseph Staten had created a joint account called "Seventh Column" so that the users of the wiki could convey suggestions for future Halo projects to them. LOMI created the article User:Seventh Column and had it redirect to the April Fools page; most users were not fooled, but it was still enjoyed by them. '10 , secretly working behind the scenes, left a template hidden in the Sitenotice a week prior to April Fools day. The template consists of a satellite picture of the Baltic Sea and a hidden URL embedded within the image. Clicking on the image will redirect the user to a Rick-Roll website. When users attempt to leave the website, notifications with the Rick-Roll lyrics would pop out. '11 ODSTSuperSpartan, a long-time troll of Halo Fanon and the IRC, was given a Request for Administration by as a joke. Unsurprisingly, many users opted to vote against him, although a few "supported" it to go along with the joke. As the first week of April Fool's passed, the RfA turned out unsuccessful, to the disappointment of no one but ODSTSuperSpartan himself. '12 On April 1, 2012 (GMT), uploaded a number of My Little Pony pictures and used them to replace several existing ones on the Main Page, from the background image to the site logo itself. This change caused a number of reactions, the most positive of which being praising Sona for pasting an MA5-wielding pony to his Fanfiction for Dummies book, and the most negative of which being declaring that he would like to strangle him.[1] , who had secretly been shown the prank by Sona in late March via Sona's Sandbox Wiki, used the idea for Halo Nation as well. This caused Leo to receive a number of rage-laden emails from the community. Halo Fanon was de-brony-fied and all MLP-related images were deleted by Sona approximately 24 hours after the prank began, with the exception of the "vandalized" Dummies book, due to Specops liking it so much he decided to keep it. '13 Sonasaurus, along with a few other users, went around tagging some of Halo Fanon's high-quality articles as non-canon friendly and stated extremely stupid reasons on the talk page. Although a majority of the wiki avoided falling victim to this April Fools' trick, some users chose to address the "issues" just as seriously. One user decided to even tag Sona's user page as non-canon friendly. All tags were removed the next day. '14 In the weeks leading up to April Fools Day rumours were spread around Halo Fanon's IRC Channel, better known as the 'Irk', that 2014 would see the greatest practical joke yet for the site. Rumours spread as hints were dropped about stories being penned by the site's top writers, while secret plans were put in motion for what would be the best April 1st in the site's history. When the day finally came, nothing happened. As it turned out, all those promises and hints were little more than a ruse to cover for the biggest joke of all; that there was no April Fools event ever planned and those 'organising' it tricked everyone into getting all hyped up for nothing. Well, we were all too lazy to do anything substantial for April Fools that year, so it sounds better this way. '15 April Fools was fairly low-key this year. Instead of something affecting the site at large, the #halo-fanon IRC channel was 'overthrown' in a sudden revolution; regular notices were replaced with propaganda spouting slogans from 1984 and warnings of 'BIG BUREAUCRAT IS WATCHING YOU'. Naturally, the administration spent the day sentencing various users to death and coming up with new site policies on the fly, such as taking the previous canon policy amendment a step further and deleting every single article that did not follow 343i canon to the letter or making the penalty for spelling mistakes a week-long ban per word. This lunacy only lasted a few hours or so before our glorious overlords snapped back into reality and restored the IRC to its natural state. '16 While no real event had been planned for 2016 aside from some possible funny messages left on the Main Page, surprised the site with the creation of a fake account on April 1st that spammed numerous pages with a new delete tag, citing a new Wikia policy that banned all fan fiction work. Upon clicking the link within the template, users would be taken to a forum page where they would be rickrolled. The prank did not quite work as intended, however, as numerous users believed the tagging to be the work of a vandal and some quickly set about reverting the edits without realising it was a prank in the subsequent confusion. The new account was swiftly banned and the site returned to normal within hours. '17 Surprisingly, 2017 saw a number of separate attempts at creating April Fools pranks by site users. acted first by creating a fake account that then published a deliberately ridiculous SPARTAN article, awarding the page the 'Best Spartan of 2552' and 'Best Article of 2552'. The account also NCF'd D379's Delta Company page that day. After leaving it up for a good few hours, everything was moved or reverted and the fake account was summarily banned. Any users who were fooled into thinking the account was a legitimate troll were directed to an 'award page' to sign their names. also chose to create a humour article for April Fools, making up a list of regulations regarding his Dyne-G217 character and the various shenanigans he had gotten up to while aboard the UNSC Infinity alongside numerous jabs at elements of the Haloverse and references to other franchises. This was treated as an entirely serious, real article until the end of the day. The final and furthest-reaching prank pulled this year was by , who made a small alteration to the site's Writer Template that replaced the name of the page's actual writer with the username of whoever happened to be looking at the page at the time. This caused a brief bout of confusion across the site before people realised what King had done, with one Bureaucrat genuinely believing that it had been some kind of coding attempt gone horribly wrong before realising it was all a joke. As with everything else, this was reverted by the end of the day and the site went back to functioning normally. '18 After the spate in April Fools activity the previous year, 2018 saw a massive surge in pranks from users across Halo Fanon. Too many pranks, as the tired bureaucrat writing this entry soon realised as the wiki descended into absolute mayhem. A harbinger of multiple April Fools plots this year was , who began by making a fake 'Halo Funnon' Discord server and linking to it on our site's Live Chat page. Essentially a reverse of our usual server, it even featured a number of people posing as fake versions of a few of the site's and real Discord server's prominent members, complete with profile pictures that were slightly different to theirs and parodies of their nicks. Following this, he created a fake account named , impersonating the infamous Forerunner ancilla as he moved or NCF'ed numerous articles in the name of the various rules implemented in a prank by as seen below. Carrying on after this, S-D379 then chose to 'update' the latest Fanon of the Month page by filling its entry on the Featured template with random interjections poking fun at its supposed 'technobabble', complete with a rick-rolling link. Finally, he then replaced our Writer of the Year, Mythic Article and Good Articles sections with versions advertising the infamous banned user , last year's Leonidas-300 humour page and the complaint-fest that is Halo: Ruined FOREVER and the user humor article Department of Redundancy Department in their stead. Much like last year, made small adjustments to several important templates that had a site-wide effect. The Writer template, which is on almost every page on the wiki, now came with a slew of new templates including NCF, WW2Halo and the dreaded Remove template, causing approximately 6800+ pages to be categorized under the respective categories. Meanwhile, made an account under the name — a reference to writer Greg Bear — to post a fanon version of Halo: Dare to Love, a romance novel mentioned for the Halo Community Update's own April Fools event. He was then 'gifted' our 100th Weekly Event, and presented users with a one-day-only challenge: write a brief summary of their opinions on Dare to Love. Naturally, it received stellar reviews almost immediately. While the account was later banned, the article remains, now as a humour page. After an April Fools entry to the Weekly which allowed users to submit their own site rules for a day, which included jokes around a strangely popular article about bees on the site, changed our wiki's wordmark to include a honeycomb pattern and replaced several of his character images with bees as well, along with a few other users. He would also temporarily change our site rules to that every single request in the Weekly prompt - fifty-six in all - were to be followed immediately. Very few were, much to everyone's relief. In addition, unexpectedly submitted a Good Article nomination and had the gall to somehow forge the signatures of all five GA panel judges in support of the page. Said article, Operation: RAINBOW, seems to be a superb impression of a Gruntpedia article circa 2010, albeit without the crude sexual humour. Mostly. As it had not reached GA minimum length, a spiel of lorem ipsum was added (in black so nobody could see it) by , whose own pranks for the day included renaming one of S-D379's characters to a car reference and creating a parody article of a well known PMC on the site for kicks. To conclude, April Fools Day 2018 was a horrible, confusing mess for all involved, and therefore good fun. Let us never go this crazy again. '19 2019. Another year, another April Fools' Day. Compared to the previous year, 2019's scope was smaller and far more focused. In a surprising twist, more Site Moderators and Admins participated in the year's festivities and organized chaos than actual users. Starting off only minutes from midnight, completed an on-schedule upload of his most recent Halo novel, Halo: Heaven and Earth, and smuggled in a dark Chapter 10 alternate-take in on a discussion between the Spartans Cassandra-G006 and Andra-D054. With assistance from in the morning, Actene concocted a plan to befuddle invested readers with the unexpected, poorly-timed confrontation between the two hotly-tempered Spartans that ended in both their deaths. Popular with the community at the time, several users responded in dire confusion and exaggerated disgust at finding out some of their favorites had been killed off without warning. For most of the day, the prank was thought to be genuine, with Distant Tide going as far to add death dates to the Spartans' wiki articles. By night time, the fake story and its addendums were revoked and the story carried on unabated. The user, , developed a sockpuppet account by the name of to incur the hatred and rage of anime-loving community members by taking on the appearance of the hated anime character of the same name. Ueno went on to create a new Halo Fanon Site Project called Malus Opus, which intended to take suggestions from users and catalog some of the "worst" articles on the site, in a parallel to the Halo Fanon:Good Articles project. Obviously, it got counter-pranked. put in time and effort to publish a fake Season 7 of the highly-anticipated return of Halo Fanon:Survival of the Fittest, starting on Saturday then publishing it on Monday. It brought together all the previous participants in Survival of the Fittest and then some as a sort of meta-test of the old community story-game where things did not go to plan at all: characters were spawning without caution into map geometry, participants were getting maimed in gruesome and sometimes inconceivable ways. The return of the little-known, borderline-humor Flood form known as "Zombie Jesus" proved one of the absurd highlights. At the end of the battle royale story, it was not any particular character that won the competition, it was a Gilgameshan honey bee, a creation from Echowaffle8 and a previous victor of Halo Fanon Annual Awards. The absurdity comes as vanguard renewed interest in seeing a real SOTF Season 7 make the rounds, the user Distant Tide, days before April Fools' Day, discussed starting it himself. As April Fools' on Halo Fanon winded down, the fake Season 7 was rebranded Season 6.5 and remains on the Survival of the Fittest hub page for others' reading pleasure. provided a fake congratulatory blog post to Halo Fanon for closing in on 12,000 wiki articles. Having previously exceeded that number, Jay was reminded as such and the blog post received its fair share of jokes by the end of the day. Calmer than the year before, 2019 still provided its fair share of freakouts, laughs, and shock value. One April Fools' Day gone, another on the way. The tradition, for good or ill, keeps going strong. Community Gallery A collection of pictures created to display Halo Fanon's community over the years, lovingly put together by site users. The Gang.png|A picture of Halo Fanon's prominent users drawn in 2011. Halo Fanon 2017.PNG|A collage of famous site characters over the years, created to celebrate Halo Fanon's tenth anniversary. HF Christmas.png|Halo Fanon's userbase gathers to celebrate Christmas 2017 CHRISTMAS2019.png|Halo Fanon's community, Christmas 2019 Notes and Facts *The first edit was by H*bad as seen here *First real edit: here *The first fanon was made by CaptainAdamGraves. The fanon was called X-121 Prototype MAC-Cannon. *On April 12-13, Halo Fanon's namespace was changed from "Halo Fan Fiction:" to "Halo Fanon:". There was a small problem when it double redirected all of the pages, but that was fixed on April 13, 2007. *Occasionally, wikia coding causes minor problems. One such problem are those few articles that, while deleted and unable to have an edit restoration, are still listed as created articles on the site, trapped in a form of limbo. A similar issue leaves images that are hard-coded into pages and templates as 'unused' when they are essential to the site. A complete list of these can be found here.